[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Circulation Menu in the Staff Client

[Nathan Eady]

"Laura M." <codegrl at gmail.com> writes:

> Awesome! :) Would you mind sending me a step-by-step recount of how
> your staff looks up a patron? 

[This is in Polaris, the ILS we are currently using.]

How I do it, given the limitations Polaris:
F6 Shift-Tab Shift-Tab B Tab Tab [scan barcode] Enter
[Total time elapsed: 2-4 seconds.]

How everyone else does it (same caveat):
 * Point and click to pull down the Circulation menu.
 * Point and click on the Patron Status option.
 * Point and click to pull down the By dropdown box.
 * Point and click on Barcode
 * Point and click in the For box.
 * [scan the barcode]
 * Point and doubleclick on the only entry in the search results.
[Total time elapsed: 10-15 seconds.]

The exact details would be a little different in Evergreen, but I
think you can see the general principle: they have to have a menu
option to click on, or they're lost.

Incidentally:

How I *want* to be able to do it:
F6 [scan barcode] Enter
[Total time elapsed: 0.mumble seconds.]

(Note: the specific choice of F6 as the keystroke is arbitrary.  If
it's F2 or F9 or whatever, I don't care, as long as it's one
keypress.)

How I *want* the rest of the staff to be able to do it:
 * Point and click to pull down the Circulation menu.
 * Point and click on the Patron Status option.
 * [scan the barcode]
 * Point and doubleclick on the only entry in the search results.
[Total time elapsed: 3-5 seconds.]

(Actually, it's possible to change a setting so that the above is
possible in Polaris, but then the workflow for looking up a patron by
name becomes the complicated one, and we do that just as often.  I
want BOTH of these procedures to have easy shortcuts with no need to
pull down drop-down boxes and change the look-up-by option each time.)

> As it stands now it seems that we can probably take out the
> duplicate menu entry with little to no disruption in work flow for a
> large majority of users.

If it's a duplicate of an entry in another menu, I probably can agree.
At some point I thought someone was advocating taking it out of the
menus altogether and relying only on shortcut keys exclusively, which
I think is only appropriate for more advanced users.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library